can recognize only 8 GB out of 20 GB hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bharat
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Bharat

I have a Dell desktop P3 700 MHz. I put in a new Maxtor 20 GB hard
drive but it only recognizes 8 GB of it. I even went to BIOS settings
and there also it doesnt show 20 GB (only shows 8GB)

Does anyone know what I need to do?

Thanks,
Bharat
 
Bharat said:
I have a Dell desktop P3 700 MHz. I put in a new Maxtor 20 GB hard
drive but it only recognizes 8 GB of it. I even went to BIOS settings
and there also it doesnt show 20 GB (only shows 8GB)

Does anyone know what I need to do?

Thanks,
Bharat
Click to expand...

Update your BIOS; from the speed of your CPU I suspect that your BIOS
is limited to 8GB HD support. Newer BIOS code will probably support
32GB, and maybe much larger. Try Dell for the BIOS update - you'll
need a BIOS code file and a program to copy the BIOS code to your MB.
 
MAXTOR drives have a "limit switch" (a jumper) on the
drive between the power plug and the IDE interface.
Remove it.

Good Luck !
 
There ar a couple of possibilities:

1. Your PC has a BIOS limit of 8 Gig. Some older motherboards did have
such a limit. Check with Dell about whether such a limit exists and wether
they have a BIOS update (also called a flash) that fixes it. Do not try to
get a BIOS directly from a motherboard maker (like Intel, ASUS, ABIT, etc),
since the boards they make for OEMs like Dell are usually different than the
ones they sell directly to the public.

2. Get a PCI adapter card with an ATA/100 controller on it that has its own
BIOS. I installed one of these a few years ago on a Pentium 2 PC and it
extended the range to 127 Gig. These are fairly cheap.

3. Think about exactly how you installed the new hard drive. Did you
"clone" the disk from the old hard drive? If yes, did you do it in a way
that created an 8 gig partition, instead of spreading out over the whole new
disk? For example, I once used Norton GHOST to clone a drive onto a larger
drive. Everything worked fine, excpet that I could only see 10 of 40 Gig.
10 Gig was the size of the old disk. The problem in my case was using the
"-IA" option in GHOST. I have since learned that it is safer (more
predictable) to clone partitions instead of whole disks, even if there is
only one partition on the disk. I fixed my problem by using Partition Magic
to create a partition on the rest of the disk, then merge it into the first
one. Note that PM could see the unformatted space on the disk. The XP disk
management tool should also be able to see raw or unformatted space and
format it. However, XP can not normally join partitions.
 
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